After waiting over 50 years, it is finally happening! Today the House Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation will hold a public hearing on UFOs! This will be the first time Congress has convened a public hearing on UFOs, or what they have renamed Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP), since 1969 when the Air Force oversaw Project Blue Book.
According to a statement by Indiana Representative Andre Carson, the chairman of the subcommittee holding the hearing, “The American people expect and deserve their leaders in government and intelligence to seriously evaluate and respond to any potential national security risks — especially those we do not fully understand.” He added, “Since coming to Congress, I’ve been focused on the issue of unidentified aerial phenomena as both a national security threat and an interest of great importance to the American public.”
California Representative Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, when announcing these public hearings stated, “There’s still much to learn about unidentified aerial phenomena and the potential risks they may pose to our national security.” He went on to say, “But one thing is sure — the American people deserve full transparency, and the federal government and Intelligence Community have a critical role to play in contextualizing and analyzing reports of UAPs.” Therefore, Schiff concluded, “The purpose of this hearing is to give the public an opportunity to hear directly from subject matter experts and leaders in the intelligence community on one of the greatest mysteries of our time, and to break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency.”
You may recall that a year ago in June 2021 the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force released a rather disappointing report that concluded UAP incidents “fall into one of five potential explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.” Yes, you read that correctly. The possibilities of extraterrestrials visiting our planet has been dismissed to an “other bin.” The same title Mom gives the folder of the miscellaneous stuff on her computer that she can’t quite categorize. That’s almost as non-conclusive as Project Blue Book’s findings 50 years earlier, which used everything from swamp gas to weather balloons to explain UFOs!
However, I have hope this time will be different because it was five months ago that Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act requiring the Pentagon to establish a permanent office to gather and investigate UAPs, and to submit an annual report and semiannual briefings for Congress. That new office is the the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), and leading up to today’s public hearings there have been closed-door briefings at the Pentagon.
Furthermore, US Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, are scheduled to testify at these hearings today. In a briefing, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby stated, “We are absolutely committed to being as transparent as we can with the American people and with members of Congress about our perspectives on this and what we’re going to try to do to make sure we have a better process for identifying these phenomena, analyzing that information in a more proactive, coordinated way than it’s been done in the past, and that we also are doing what we need to do to mitigate any safety issues as many of these phenomena have been sighted in training ranges and in training environments.”
The hearing will stream live starting at 9:00 am EST, today, May 17, 2022. After the public portion airs, the subcommittee will hold a closed, classified briefing. Unfortunately, despite being a renowned Dog Ufologist, my invitation to the closed session must have got lost in the mail, but you can watch the live stream with me at Open C3 Subcommittee Hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
